nautilus gvfs-afc property page info

[Timothy Ward <gtwa001 gmail com>]

Posted from a thread on fedora develop list as info for nautilus
maintainers and developers.

 Yup. The "normal" mount contains nothing that normal users should
access.
> Accessing the photos will leave ghosts on the device, and there have
been no
> ways to update the music database in Linux for a few iOS releases.

I very much doubt that anyone would release any code to touch an
idevice music database due to fear of
legal action from the manufacturer. It may exist already.

The ability to sync contacts, calendars and events, meeting info,
notes, pictures etc ( anything that would be considered the personal
data entered by the idevice owner is another matter entirely. Anything
that the law provides in most countries such as the IP to that person
or the copyright of documents or photos etc, and yes it can be a very
grey area between the laws in different countries. This is just the
other side of the coin but this time from the owners perspective and
legal rights.

is 
>  
> You can still access the device by editing the URL in the "Documents
on..."
> location. Just remove the ":3" at the end.

Thanks for this info,
>  
> If you have use cases that aren't the 2 mentioned above, or using
your iDevice
> as a thumb drive, please file bugs against gvfs in the upstream
GNOME Bugzilla.
>  
> Cheers


While I agree for the normal non developer user, the removal, to be
able to access what you could originally access, on the idevice before
the code change, may be of little value.

It is frustrating if you are developing applications and need access
to these areas for debugging, checking directory, files and structure
etc of the idevice. 

It is even more frustrating when the Fedora workstation is being
targetted as a developer's platform, and it also affects any
downstream distribution developers in the same way.

While nautilus still exposes the pictures on an idevice
through  gphoto2 system does not seem to have changed. 

As far as I am aware it is possible to copy pictures from the idevice
but transfers of pictures to the idevice will succeed, but will not be
shown on the idevice by native apps without further hacking.

The other mount exposes the so called document folder of some user
installed apps on the idevice and may be useful for someone developing
but is off limited use to a normal non developer user, unless the
normal non developer wants to use the phone as a usb drive to
transport files without carrying an extra usb drive.

The removal of the nautilus properties page on a connected idevice
does have an effect that a nautilus-ideviceinfo extension that has
been in gnome git for many years cannot be easily exposed and used and
a gnome bugzilla entry has been active from last year without even a
comment to date. 

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=741302

https://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus-ideviceinfo/log/?ofs=100

http://blog.sukimashita.com/2015/01/09/gtk-3-support-for-nautilus-idev
iceinfo/

I hope this can  be resolved in the short term as it provides all
users of idevices with info that is expected today and further
benefits the foss community and the goals of Fedora, Gnome and
downstream distributions etc.
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